THE WAR: Peace Talks Again in Paris

THROUGH the long years of the Viet Nam War, the U.S. has repeatedly been assured that one more turn of the screw, one more push of escalation would bring the enemy to the negotiating table in earnest at last, if not to his knees. Now the enemy is coming once more to the table; top North Vietnamese Negotiator Le Due Tho returns to Paris this week presumably to resume the secret sessions with the U.S. that were broken off last November. But it is not exactly on the terms that Washington wanted. It is the enemy that has escalated; it is the U.S. that is in need of an agreement. With American ground troops out of action and U.S. options more limited than ever, President Nixon's Vietnamization policies and perhaps his re-election prospects are on severest trial.

The battlefield situation is grave.

While the South Vietnamese have fought bravely in some sectors, they have caved in elsewhere. The North Vietnamese, heavily supplied by the Soviet Union, are driving hard for Kontum in the Central Highlands, toward Quang Tri near the coast, and are menacing Hue. As the Communists approach urban centers, the U.S. faces another painful decision: whether to continue its air and artillery support at the cost of civilian lives in the cities. The open aggression has signaled a third Indochina war, and it could drag on as inconclusively, as destructively, as hopelessly as the earlier two wars that engaged first the

French and then the Americans (see THE WORLD).

Faced with that grim prospect, Nixon went on TV to talk tough. "All that we have risked and all that we have gained over the years now hangs in the balance," he said. "We will not be defeated and we will never surrender our friends to Communist aggression." He repeated the familiar threat that "a bloodbath" would follow if North Viet Nam took over in Saigon. He reiterated a theme employed by every Administration that has been involved in the war: "If one country armed with the most modern weapons can invade another nation and succeed in conquering it, other countries will be encouraged to do the same thing." But he carefully pinned all the prognostications that the South Vietnamese would hold in the present crisis on the evaluation of his commander on the scene, General Creighton Abrams.

Right or wrong, the words have been played so many times over for a war-weary American public that they seemed emptied of meaning, a kind of litany of the Viet Nam nightmare. But at the same time, Nixon said that he would continue to withdraw troops from South Viet Nam, though at a slower rate. In the next two months, 20,000 will go. Nixon also announced that he was resuming the Paris peace talks, "not simply in order to hear more empty propaganda and bombast from the North Vietnamese, but to get on with the constructive business of making peace."

He expected progress to be made "through all available channels."